Newbie query - reading data into R

Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:

             Number
Napier          324
Auckland        657
Wellington      879
Christchurch    904

works on your example (with tabs in the file).

(S-PLUS behaves differently here, and guesses the first column
should be the row names without being told).  

So does read.table on Unix - I don't remember it doing anything else?

(On R? Your own example shows it does not!)

Whooops. I assumed that the input file had had the "City" header
removed when I saw that display. I honestly didn't believe that S-plus
could be that silly (it scans the variables, grabs the first
nonnumeric one that has no duplicated values and uses it for
rownames!):

On Splus 3.4:

read.table("test.dat", header=T)

             Number 
      Napier    324

..

which is not the same as R 0.63.2:

read.table("test.dat", header=T)

          City Number
1       Napier    324

..

is it?  That was my point: read.table in R and S-PLUS are subtly different.

Agreed. However, even after noticing the difference, I really don't
think that that bit of S-plus behaviour is worth cloning. 

(S-plus, after duplicating the Wellington line:)

read.table('tmp/testdata',header=T)     

City Number 
1       Napier    324
2     Auckland    657
3   Wellington    879
4   Wellington    879
5 Christchurch    904

O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907
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--
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907

Yes - good news here. I think I must have put an extra "tab" or some
such 
 thing in my text file. I re-edited it (carefully putting in only one
tab 
 after the first column). I then entered the command as follows -

b <- read.table("C:\\RDoc\\data1.txt",header=T)
b

City         Number
1 Napier       2341  
2 Hastings     3425  
3 Otara        7694  
4 Wellington    458  
5 Christchurch 2015  
6 Dunedin      3021  
7 Nelson        879

class(b)

[1] "data.frame"

mode(b)

[1] "list" 

 Success!  

 ( I think I may have also been thrown by using the mode() function
(which shows "list")
 rather than the class() function which shows data-frame.  )

  Very many thanks to all who have helped me here.  Good to be part of a
community 
 using such a wonderful package ....  :-)
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